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Clad in orange jumpsuits, a group of high school students carrying large suitcases trudged onto the center stage. Heads down with hands, feet and waists shackled, they took a seat on their suitcases while two girls dressed as nuns slithered through the “criminals” and settled in front of them.
“Watch this space for a big announcement” — that’s the message David Feiner, co-founder of the Albany Park Theater Project, posted Wednesday night to a Facebook group of current and alumni members of the theater’s youth ensemble.
This morning, Albany Park Theater Project was named a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. All of us at APTP – the youth ensemble, alumni, staff, and board of directors – are honored and overjoyed to celebrate this monumental news with the friends, audience members, donors, and partners who have nurtured our creative community over the past 19 years.
Happy new year to all of our wonderful APTP family and friends! As we welcome the new year, we look forward to all of the people and experiences we will encounter as we move toward our production of Learning Curve, our immersive theater performance that premieres this summer and places audiences within the walls of a Chicago public school and in the shoes of its students.
Critics and audiences have made Feast one of the most celebrated shows of Summer 2015. “Beautiful, honest, magical, thrilling, acrobatic, moving, spiced, wondrous, subversive, brave, visceral, provocative, joyful, propulsive, universal, delicious”…are some of the superlatives critics have lavished up Feast.
If you’re going to produce a theatrical production based on interviews with Chicagoans talking about food, Albany Park is as good a place to start as any. Not only is it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city—and in the country—it’s also home to the Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers that has a history of producing shows that are honest, funny, and inspirational in the best possible way: after you see them, you want to do something.
WBEZ’s Morning Shift interviews APTP resident director, Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, and ensemble member, Ely Espino, about “Feast.” Listen here.
Albany Park Theater Project is honored to be the recipient of this year’s $100,000 Impact Grant from Impact 100 Chicago‘s suburban chapter. Impact 100 Chicago is a women-only organization with members from all parts of the Chicagoland area. The 180 members of the suburban chapter voted to award this year’s Impact Grant to APTP to support the full-scale, world-premiere production in 2016 of Learning Curve, an innovative performance about public education that will actually place audiences within the walls of a Chicago public school and in the shoes of its students. APTP is collaborating on this groundbreaking production with Third Rail Projects, the New York-based, experimental dance-theater ensemble considered one of the foremost creators of immersive and site-specific performance.
Impact 100 members cast their votes after hearing live project presentations from 5 finalist organizations. APTP is proud to be the first-ever cultural organization to receive this chapter’s Impact Grant. All of us at APTP extend our deepest gratitude to the members of Impact 100 Chicago, especially the Culture Committee who selected us as their finalist and advocated for us. We promise that your investment in Albany Park Theater Project will truly make a difference in the world…and we can’t wait to share Learning Curve with you in 2016.
APTP’s Impact 100 presentation was made by Lilia Escobar, an alum from our Class of 2013, and David Feiner, Producing Artistic Director.
I met David Feiner, artistic director of Albany Park Theater Project, in the fall of 2013 after he wrote to Third Rail Projects about his experience at our show Then She Fell and inquired about meeting to chat about sharing this format with the APTP youth ensemble. Working with teenagers is not exactly in my comfort zone, but faced with David’s enthusiasm and excitement, I found myself just saying “Well, how about we just come out to Chicago and teach a workshop with your company?”
Two years ago we brought you I Will Kiss These Walls, a play based on the real-life stories of Chicagoans swept into the foreclosure crisis. This Friday February 20, join APTP as we perform scenes from “Walls” in the liberated home of Maria and Jorge, whose lives we depicted in “Walls” (7 PM at 7245 N. Ridge, Chicago).